Leaked documents show Army’s Bold Plan to Acquire 10,000 Square Miles of Colorado
Artillery ranges and tank maneuvers on fragile grasslands. Depopulated farm towns, suitable for urban warfare exercises for thousands of troops. A military installation the size of Massachusetts, sprawling across southern Colorado from Trinidad to the Kansas border. If you’re going to plan, plan big. And the U.S. Army’s plans for expansion of its Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site have an audacity that’s hard to beat.

This week’s cover story, “The War Next Door,” explores the long-running battle over the PCMS, a 235,000-acre site the Army acquired in the 1980s to prepare troops from Fort Carson for combat, and a current proposal for increased training there. After several political setbacks, the Army says it’s put aside any plans to expand the PCMS for now. But landowners, preservationists and others are skeptical, given the grand scenario for expansion contained in military documents obtained by opponents through leaks and Freedom of Information Act requests.

Army exercise at PCMS.

Ranchers who’ve run cattle in southeastern Colorado for generations first started hearing rumors of possible expansion of the site in 2005. In fact, prompted by a growing concentration of troops at Fort Carson because of base closures and realignments, the military had been studying acquisition of additional land for years before that. But locals’ first clue of the scale involved came in the form of a leaked map that looked a lot like this one:

The map, which appears in a 2004 planning document, shows a series of phased-in purchases over many years, starting with modest strips of property adjoining the current site. But the entire deal would eventually encompass 6.9 million acres — that’s more than 10,000 square miles, a tenth of the entire state’s land area. The Pinon Canyon Expansion Opposition Coalition promptly translated this into a more vividly colored map, on view below, to give a better idea of what the Army had in mind:

The 2004 planning document states that the PCMS is ideally situated to become a training center for all the armed services — and allied forces as well: “Given its size, remote location, diverse terrain, and infrastructure, PCMS far surpasses the training experience of any Combat Training Center in CONUS.” (That’s the contiguous United States, soldier.)

The move would involve displacing a population of at least 17,000 civilians and transferring the Comanche National Grasslands from U.S. Forest Service to military control, but the study predicted that holding large-scale training exercises there “will be a positive change and natural wildlife habitation possibilities [will] increase.”

REPORT: You Have More Money In Your Wallet Than Bank Of America Pays In Federal Taxes

Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street Movement — a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans — are in the streets, demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid and health benefits for public workers claim that they have no choice but than to take these actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.

But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets — it was Wall Street. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:

[Gibson] explains, “I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

Indeed, as politicians are asking ordinary Americans to sacrifice their education, their health, their labor rights, and their wellbeing to tackle budget deficits, some of the world’s richest multinational corporations are getting away with shirking their responsibility and paying nothing. ThinkProgress has assembled a short but far from comprehensive list of these tax dodgers — corporations which have rigged the tax system to their advantage so they can reap huge profits and avoid paying taxes:

- BANK OF AMERICA: In 2009, Bank of America didn’t pay a single penny in federal income taxes, exploiting the tax code so as to avoid paying its fair share. “Oh, yeah, this happens all the time,” said Robert Willens, a tax accounting expert interviewed by McClatchy. “If you go out and try to make money and you don’t do it, why should the government pay you for your losses?” asked Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. The same year, the mega-bank’s top executives received pay “ranging from $6 million to nearly $30 million.”

- BOEING: Despite receiving billions of dollars from the federal government every single year in taxpayer subsidies from the U.S. government, Boeing didn’t “pay a dime of U.S. federal corporate income taxes” between 2008 and 2010.

- CITIGROUP: Citigroup’s deferred income taxes for the third quarter of 2010 amounted to a grand total of $0.00. At the same time, Citigroup has continued to pay its staff lavishly. “John Havens, the head of Citigroup’s investment bank, is expected to be the bank’s highest paid executive for the second year in a row, with a compensation package worth $9.5 million.”

- EXXON-MOBIL: The oil giant uses offshore subsidiaries in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes in the United States. Although Exxon-Mobil paid $15 billion in taxes in 2009, not a penny of those taxes went to the American Treasury. This was the same year that the company overtook Wal-Mart in the Fortune 500. Meanwhile the total compensation of Exxon-Mobil’s CEO the same year was over $29,000,000.

- GENERAL ELECTRIC: In 2009, General Electric — the world’s largest corporation — filed more than 7,000 tax returns and still paid nothing to U.S. government. They managed to do this by a tax code that essentially subsidizes companies for losing profits and allows them to set up tax havens overseas. That same year GE CEO Jeffery Immelt — who recently scored a spot on a White House economic advisory board — “earned total compensation of $9.89 million.” In 2002, Immelt displayed his lack of economic patriotism, saying, “When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China….I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion.”

- WELLS FARGO: Despite being the fourth largest bank in the country, Wells Fargo was able to escape paying federal taxes by writing all of its losses off after its acquisition of Wachovia. Yet in 2009 the chief executive of Wells Fargo also saw his compensation “more than double” as he earned “a salary of $5.6 million paid in cash and stock and stock awards of more than $13 million.”

In the coming months, politicians across the country are going to tell Americans that the only way to stave off huge deficit and balance the budgets is by gutting programs for the poor, eviscerating support for the middle class, eliminating labor rights, and decimating the government’s ability to serve the public interest. This is a lie. The United States is the richest country in the history of the world, and income inequality is higher now than it has been at any time since the 1920′s, with the top “top 1 percentile of households [taking] home 23.5 percent of income in 2007.”

QE3? Several Top Federal Reserve Officials Seem To Think That More Quantitative Easing Is Necessary

The end of QE2 is still several months away and yet quite a few top Federal Reserve officials are already hinting that more quantitative easing may be necessary. Apparently the U.S. economy is not moving forward as rapidly as they would like. So it looks like "QE3" could be on the way. But did anyone out there actually believe that quantitative easing would come to a complete stop in June? Whether they call it "QE3" or something else entirely, the reality of the matter is that we have now come to a time when the Federal Reserve is going to be continually purchasing a significant percentage of all new U.S. government debt. This is essentially a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but sadly there is just not enough money in the rest of the world to be able to continue to feed the U.S. government's voracious appetite for debt. Right now Ben Bernanke and his cohorts are trying to break the news to us gently, but anyone with half a brain can see what is happening. The only way for the game to keep going is for the Federal Reserve to print lots more money, and that is going to be incredibly bad for the U.S. economy in the long run.

The other day James Bullard, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, made national headlines when he declared that Fed officials should "never say never" when it comes to QE3 and more quantitative easing. But the truth is that other Fed officials have been dropping public hints about the "need" for QE3 for several weeks now...

So how in the world did things get to the point where the Federal Reserve feels forced to recklessly print gigantic piles of money?

Well, it didn't happen overnight. Back during the 1980s and 1990s there were many people that desperately tried to warn about what would happen if U.S. government debt was not brought under control.

Unfortunately, our politicians did not heed those warnings.

Today, the U.S. national debt has reached a grand total of $14,137,541,098,872.71. It is 14 times larger than it was just 30 years ago. It is the largest single debt in the history of the world.

So why don't our politicians just balance the budget now so that we don't keep having to borrow so much money?

Well, there are some huge problems. First of all, when you combine entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare with interest on the national debt, it comes to approximately 64 percent of all federal government spending.

But that is not the bad news.

In the years ahead, entitlement spending and interest on the national debt are both projected to absolutely explode.

We are rapidly approaching a time when spending on entitlement programs and interest on the national debt will be significantly greater than all of the revenue that the federal government brings in each year. All federal revenues will be spoken for even before a single penny is spent on defense, education, running the government or anything else.

Either entitlement programs are going to have to be seriously reformed or the U.S. government is going to have to come up with a massive amount of extra money from somewhere or the U.S. government is going to have to borrow increasingly large piles of money from someone.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions and most of our politicians are scared to death to touch entitlement programs because it will mean that they will lose votes...

In a January 2009 ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, then President-elect Barack Obama said fixing the economy required shared sacrifice, "Everybody’s going to have to give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin in the game." (1)
For the past two years, American workers submitted to the President’s appeal—taking steep pay cuts despite hectic productivity growth. By contrast, corporate executives have extracted record profits by sabotaging the recovery on every front—eliminating employees, repressing wages, withholding investment, and shirking federal taxes.

The global recession increased unemployment in every country, but the American experience is unparalleled. According to a July OECD report, the U.S. accounted for half of all job losses among the 31 richest countries from 2007 to mid-2010. (2) The rise of U.S. unemployment greatly exceeded the fall in economic output. Aside from Canada, U.S. GDP actually declined less than any other rich country, from mid-2008 to mid 2010. (3)

Washington’s embrace of labor market flexibility ensured companies encountered little resistance when they launched their brutal recovery plans. Leading into the recession, the US had the weakest worker protections against individual and collective dismissals in the world, according to a 2008 OECD study. (4) Blackrock’s Robert Doll explains, “When the markets faltered in 2008 and revenue growth stalled, U.S. companies moved decisively to cut costs—unlike their European and Japanese counterparts.” (5) The U.S. now has the highest unemployment rate among the ten major developed countries. (6).

The private sector has not only been the chief source of massive dislocation in the labor market, but it is also a beneficiary. Over the past two years, productivity has soared while unit labor costs have plummeted. By imposing layoffs and wage concessions, U.S. companies are supplying their own demand for a tractable labor market. Private sector union membership is the lowest on record. (7) Deutsche Bank Chief Economist Joseph LaVorgna notes that profits-per-employee are the highest on record, adding, “I think what investors are missing - and even the Federal Reserve - is the phenomenal health of the corporate sector.” (8)

Due to falling tax revenues, state and local government layoffs are accelerating. By contrast, U.S. companies increased their headcount in November at the fastest pace in three years, marking the tenth consecutive month of private sector job creation. The headline numbers conceal a dismal reality; after a lost decade of employment growth, the private sector cannot keep pace with new entrants into the workforce.

The few new jobs are unlikely to satisfy Americans who lost careers. In November, temporary labor represented an astonishing 80% of private sector job growth. Companies are transforming temporary labor into a permanent feature of the American workforce. UPI reports, “This year, 26.2 percent of new private sector jobs are temporary, compared to 10.9 percent in the recovery after the 1990s recession and 7.1 percent in previous recoveries.” (9) The remainder of 2010 private sector job growth has consisted mainly of low-wage, scant-benefit service sector jobs, especially bars and restaurants, which added 143,000 jobs, growing at four times the rate of the rest of the economy. (10)

Aside from job fairs, large corporations have been conspicuously absent from the tepid jobs recovery. But they are leading the profit recovery. Part of the reason is the expansion of overseas sales, but the profit recovery is primarily coming off the backs of American workers. After decades of globalization, U.S. multinationals still employ two-thirds of their global workforce from the U.S. (21.1 million out of 31.2 million). (11) Corporate executives are hammering American workers precisely because they are so dependent on them.

An annual study by USA Today found that private sector paychecks as a share of Americans’ total income fell to 41.9 percent earlier this year, a record low. (12) Conservative analysts seized on the report as proof of President Obama’s agenda to redistribute wealth from, in their words, those ‘pulling the cart’ to those ‘simply riding in it’. Their accusation withstands the evidence—only it’s corporate executives and wealthy investors enjoying the free ride. Corporate executives have found a simple formula: the less they contribute to the economy, the more they keep for themselves and shareholders. The Fed’s Flow of Funds reveals corporate profits represented a near record 11.2% of national income in the second quarter. (13)
Non-financial companies have amassed nearly two-trillion in cash, representing 11% of total assets, a sixty year high. Companies have not deployed the cash on hiring as weak demand and excess capacity plague most industries. Companies have found better use for the cash, as Robert Doll explains, “high cash levels are already generating dividend increases, share buybacks, capital investments and M&A activity—all extremely shareholder friendly.” (5)

Companies invested roughly $262 billion in equipment and software investment in the third quarter. (14) That compares with nearly $80 billion in share buybacks. (15) The paradox of substantial liquid assets accompanying a shortfall in investment validates Keynes’ idea that slumps are caused by excess savings. Three decades of lopsided expansions has hampered demand by clotting the circulation of national income in corporate balance sheets. An article in the July issue of The Economist observes: “business investment is as low as it has ever been as a share of GDP.” (16)

The decades-long shift in the tax burden from corporations to working Americans has accelerated under President Obama. For the past two years, executives have reported record profits to their shareholders partially because they are paying a pittance in federal taxes. Corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP in 2009 and 2010 are the lowest on record, just above 1%. (17)

The American middle class is being attacked by an oligarchy, who wants to control economy, as Wisconsin protests the plan to constrain public sector unions, a US expert says.

The demonstration against the controversial move to curb power of labor unions and lay off thousands of public servants in the US state of Wisconsin has been driven by the middle classes who say they are witnessing a dramatic decline in unions and are outraged by an attack on public sectors, Jennifer Loewenstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Press TV on Sunday.

On Saturday, about 100,000 people converged in the Wisconsin State Capitol to show their anger at the Republican governors' decision to strip public sector unions of most collective bargaining rights in areas of healthcare coverage, pensions and other benefits.

The demonstration, which was one of the biggest rallies since the Vietnam War, has taken place on the character of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt whose autocratic leaders had control of vast areas of the economy in their countries.

When asked about the fact that five percent of the US population control 85 percent of the productive wealth, Loewenstein stated that "It's unbelievable, in fact, how much the middle class… is being attacked by an oligarchy, basically, of people who want to control the nations' economy."

"In Madison, this [problem] came out in the form of a so-called reform bill by our state governor… and this is now the last straw. This is an attack on public sector workers and public labor unions…this is time for a democratic revival in the United States," said Loewenstein, who is also the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elsewhere in her remarks, she turned the spotlight on the overhanging issue of the budget deficit of $137 million and a projected $3.6 billion gap over the next two years in Wisconsin, which have often times been referred to as the primary cause of the curb in power of public sector unions.

"The state does not have to cut the collective bargaining rights of the middle class or the lower class in order to repair its budget, what it needs to do is to start taxing corporations, taxing the rich, raising taxes on people who have billions of dollars, and, in addition, we should have long ago realized that the trillions of dollars going towards our overseas military adventures are going to have a profound effect on the US economy," she noted.

"Why don't we cut our defense spending, which is not defensive spending in any case, because we are not fighting defensive wars, we are fighting offensive wars, and ruing, destroying countries overseas with state of the art weaponry, which also has an economic base in the United States,” the American expert emphasized.

She went on to say that "the budget crisis and the attempt by the governor of Wisconsin to grab power in favor of big money, and powers that control our presidential elections are going to wake up our public sector workers and make them realize that we can afford to go off on these adventures overseas."

High fuel prices are putting the squeeze on drivers just as they are starting to feel better about the economy. They are also forcing tough choices on small-business owners loath to charge more for fear of losing customers.

It is quite startling to realise that a special room had been set up to receive the dead of the July 7th bombings in a temporary morgue built on army land, the contract for which arrived on the contractor’s desk on July 6th, the day before the massacres.

All the bodies of the dead were taken and cryogenically stored here.

Military site for the Bodies

It is also quite startling to realise that a special room had been set up to receive the dead – starting work on July 6th, the day before the 7/7 massacres.

Here is a statement about what happened on that day, and where the bodies went:

Based in Northamptonshire in the UK, the company [De Boer] had already completed several contracts for the Metropolitan Police …The De Boer team spent months visiting permanent mortuaries and attending meetings with London Resilience to suggest a suitable structure and interior design… Six months later on July 6, 2005, a document arrived at De Boer’s UK headquarters finalising what had been agreed for a future crisis response. Within 24 hours the plan was being realised .and implemented with the creation of a temporary mortuary in the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company near Moorgate Underground Station in central London.’ (source, ‘London’s Response to 7/7’ David Donegan Office of the Strategic Health Authorities at NHS, in www.crisisresponsejournal.com no longer online, held in J7 archives: and quoted here)
Good timing or what? Thus an ‘emergency mortuary’ was established on a Military site in the City of London – the day before the catastrophe. Not only did this military site receive all of the bodies, but it set up ancillary sites adjacent to the four blast sites on the morning of July 7th: ‘Outside of the mortuary De Boer also provided structures and furniture at each of the Underground Stations affected, and refrigeration facilities at the site of the bus bombing.’

The De Boer company managed it so well that, in recognition, its project manager was invited to meet Tony Blair at Downing Street. It was felt that, at such very short notice – after all, they only got the job on July 6th – they had done a fine job. Concerning the swift freezing of the bus bomb victim bodies: while researching ‘Terror On The Tube’ . I could only see two or three corpses lying around in all of the photographs of that bus wreck, so I guess the De Boer team must have removed them swiftly.

We are also reminded of the big FEMA vans that arrived to clear up the damage in New York at Ground Zero on 9/11 (Federal Emergency Management Agency): they were proud of how quickly they arrived, in fact they arrived (by a similar sinister precognition) on Monday evening, the day before the very surprising 9/11 event.

Frank Buckles, who lied about his age to get into uniform during World War I and lived to be the last surviving U.S. veteran of that war, has died. He was 110.

Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in World War II, died peacefully of natural causes early Sunday at his home in Charles Town, biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said in a statement. Buckles turned 110 on Feb. 1 and had been advocating for a national memorial honoring veterans of the Great War in Washington, D.C.

When asked in February 2008 how it felt to be the last of his kind, he said simply, "I realized that somebody had to be, and it was me." And he told The Associated Press he would have done it all over again, "without a doubt."

Will The Death Of The Dollar Lead To The Birth Of A New World Economic Order?

There is no getting around it. The U.S. dollar is dying. U.S. government debt continues to grow at a very frightening pace and the Federal Reserve is now buying up most of the new debt that is being issued. At this point there is simply not enough money in the rest of the world to continue to feed the U.S. government's endless thirst for more debt so the Federal Reserve has had to directly intervene in order to keep the Ponzi scheme going. Other nations are rapidly losing faith in the U.S. dollar as they realize that there is simply no way that the U.S. government will be able to service this soaring debt for much longer. Even now we are watching the U.S. dollar rapidly fall against a vast array of hard assets. Virtually all major agricultural commodities have exploded in price over the past year, the price of gold is over $1400 an ounce again and last week U.S. crude oil prices topped $100 a barrel for the first time since 2008. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to print dollars as if there is no tomorrow and the U.S. government continues to spend dollars as if the party is never going to end. Yes, we are most definitely witnessing the death of the dollar.

As a result of the decline of the dollar, U.S. consumers are really starting to see some substantial inflation at the supermarket and at the gas pump. In fact, the average price of gasoline in the United States increased 17 cents to $3.33 a gallon in just the past week, and more increases are expected in the weeks ahead.

Unfortunately, most Americans still don't understand that the monstrous debt that the U.S. government has accumulated has us on a road that is going to lead to economic ruin.

Back in the early 1980s, the U.S. national debt was considered a major national crisis and politicians were pledging to do something about it.

Well, they did something about it alright.

Today, the U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981.

Unfortunately, it is only going to continue to increase in size.

Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare account for 58% of all U.S. government spending. Those are "sacred cows" politically and very few politicians will even talk about making cuts to those programs.

Defense spending accounts for another 20% of all U.S. government spending. This is another area that is very tough to cut politicially.

So that leaves only about 22% of the budget to cut. Sadly, that entire 22% could be eliminated from the federal budget and we would still be running an absolutely massive budget deficit.

Yes, we are in a huge amount of trouble.

So what are our politicians doing about it?

Well, over the past decade they have shown that they are very good at voting for increases to government spending but they are very poor at voting for cuts to government spending.

For example, during Barack Obama's first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.

In fact, if Barack Obama has his way government spending is going to increase by another 50 percent over the next decade. In the new budget that Obama recently proposed, the U.S. government would spend 3.7 trillion dollars in 2012 and by 2021 the U.S. government would be spending a whopping 5.6 trillion dollars per year.

But when it comes to cutting the budget nothing ever seems to happen.

Right now, Republicans and Democrats are fighting tooth and nail over $61 billion in budget cuts.

But even if the Republicans get all of those cuts it would be just a drop in the bucket.

After all, what does it really matter if the U.S. budget deficit is 1.59 trillion dollars instead of 1.65 trillion dollars this year?

But listening to the Republicans and the Democrats blow hot air you would think that the fate of the world is at stake.

Meanwhile, our states are going broke as well. In fact, 30 U.S. states have borrowed a total of $41.5 billion from the federal government just so that they could continue paying out unemployment benefits.

California alone has borrowed $9.8 billion in unemployment benefit money from the federal government, and nobody is really quite sure when they will be able to quit borrowing more unemployment money from the U.S. government.

Things have gotten completely and totally out of control.

But if the U.S. government quits borrowing and spending money so feverishly it will cause a dramatic slowdown in the U.S. economy and nobody seems to want that.

Even with all of the crazy government spending that has been going on the U.S. economy is still on the verge of total collapse.

Global Economy? 23 Facts Which Prove That Globalism Is Pushing The Standard Of Living Of The Middle Class Down To Third World Levels

The truth is that the global economy is bad for America. The following are 23 facts which prove that globalism is pushing the standard of living of the middle class down to third world levels....

#1 From December 2000 to December 2010, the U.S. ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars.

#2 The U.S. trade deficit was about 33 percent larger in 2010 than it was in 2009.

#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.

#4 The U.S. economy is rapidly trading high wage jobs for low wage jobs. According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.

#5 Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

#6 In Germany, exports account for approximately 40 percent of GDP. In China, exports account for approximately 30 percent of GDP. In the United States, exports account for approximately 13 percent of GDP.

#7 Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe? Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

#8 In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

#9 The U.S. economy now has 10 percent fewer "middle class jobs" than it did just ten years ago.

#10 The United States currently has 7.7 million fewer payroll jobs than it did back in December 2007.

#11 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.

#12 In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in "advanced technology products" of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

#13 The United States now spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

#14 In China, working conditions are so bad that large numbers of "employees" regularly try to commit suicide. One major employer, Foxconn, has even gone so far as to install "anti-suicide nets" in an attempt to keep their employees from jumping off of their buildings.

#15 Wages for workers in China are incredibly low. For example, one facility in the city of Longhua that makes iPods employs approximately 200,000 workers. These workers put in endless 15-hour days but they only make about $50 per month.

#16 In Bangladesh, manufacturing workers toil in absolutely horrific conditions and make an average of about $38 per month.

#17 In Vietnam, teenage workers often work seven days a week for as little as 6 cents an hour making promotional Disney toys for McDonald's.

#18 Since 2001, over 42,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been closed.

#19 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

#20 In the United States today, 6.2 million Americans have been out of work for 6 months of longer.

#21 8.4 million Americans are currently working part-time jobs for "economic reasons". These jobs are mostly very low paying service jobs.

#22 When you adjust wages for inflation, middle class workers in the United States make less money today than they did back in 1971.

#23 According to Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup, China will be the largest economy in the world by the year 2020, and India will surpass China by the year 2050.

Those that promote "free trade" can never explain how the U.S. middle class is going to continue to have plenty of jobs in the new global economy.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

A Government Shut-down Imperils the Power of Congress
by Paul Craig Roberts
Congress should think twice before forcing a government shutdown as the consequences could be the loss of the power of Congress to control spending through authorization and appropriation bills.

Congress permitted President George W. Bush to accumulate new powers in the executive, and these powers have passed to Obama. Bush succeeded in establishing that as a wartime commander-in-chief he had the “inherent power” to disobey the laws against torture, spying on Americans without obtaining warrants, and indefinite detention. In addition, Bush used signing statements in ways inconsistent with his oath and obligation to uphold the laws of the United States, and he took the U.S. to war based on lies, deception, and fabricated “evidence,” an offense that qualifies as treason.

With these precedents, it is a simple matter for President Obama to declare that, with the U.S. at war in a world of growing instability, he has the inherent power to ignore the debt limit and to continue financing the government with the creation of new money by the Federal Reserve.

Congress could try to protect its loss of the power of the purse by impeaching Obama. But how credible would it be to impeach a wartime president who is using the same “inherent power” of his office that Congress permitted the previous president to use?

The powers that Bush asserted not only violated statutory law, but also set aside constitutionally guaranteed rights that are the essence of American liberty. Yet, Congress made no attempt to restrain him with impeachment. How then does Congress impeach a president who is merely using his power to keep a government at war operating?

As President Bush’s acts were not deemed impeachable offenses, it seems likely that Congress has lost its power to impeach through default.

All who enjoy hearing a meaty Marc Faber fire and brimstone sermon, that cuts through the bullshit, will be happy to know that the Gloom, Boom and Doom author conducted a 40 minute interview with the McAlvany Financial Group, which covers all the usual suspects: gold, silver, precious and industrial metals, the "crack up boom", the future of the Ponzi and capital markets in general and much more. Of course, it wouldn't be a Faber interview without the requisite soundbite: "I think we are all doomed. I think what will happen is that we are in the midst of a kind of a crack-up boom that is not sustainable, that eventually the economy will deteriorate, that there will be more money-printing, and then you have inflation, and a poor economy, an extreme form of stagflation, and, eventually, in that situation, countries go to war, and, as a whole, derivatives, the market, and everything will collapse, and like a computer when it crashes, you will have to reboot it." Of course, on a long enough timeline...

Key extract from the Faber speech:

I think we are all doomed. I think what will happen is that we are in the midst of a kind of a crack-up boom that is not sustainable, that eventually the economy will deteriorate, that there will be more money-printing, and then you have inflation, and a poor economy, an extreme form of stagflation, and, eventually, in that situation, countries go to war, and, as a whole, derivatives, the market, and everything will collapse, and like a computer when it crashes, you will have to reboot it.

For the investor, the question is: How do I navigate through this complete disaster that is going to unfold? And I think if you look at different asset classes – real estate, equities, bonds, cash, precious metals – I suppose that you have to be diversified. I think real estate in the U.S. may go down another 10% or so, or even 15%, but I am always telling people, if you can buy the piece of land or the house you like, what do you actually care if it does down another 10%? If everything I bought in my life had only gone down 10-15%, I would be very rich, because a lot of things became worthless, especially loans to friends, and bonds, and so forth.

Look at the history, for example, of Germany, for the last 100 years. They had World War I. They had the hyper-inflation in World War II. The bond-holders got wiped out three times. If you owned Siemens, and you still own Siemens today, it was not a fantastic investment, but at least you still have something. You were not wiped out. I think that in equities you will be better off because you have an ownership in a company, than by being the lenders to companies, and the lenders, especially, to governments.

Faber on the key distinction between nominal and real, which nobody on CNBC seems to grasp yet, why gold now is cheaper than it was in 1999, and on the Dow and gold reaching parity.

In a money-printing environment, it is very difficult to know what is actually cheap and what is expensive. Is the price of wheat high, or is it low? Inflation-adjusted, it is extremely low. In nominal terms, it is relatively high. I believe that, in March 2009 when the S&P was at 666, the market was actually much cheaper than is generally perceived, because of the money-printing, and I do not anticipate that we will see 666 on the S&P again, in nominal terms.

In other words, they are going to print so much money that the S&P could be at, perhaps, 2000, but in real terms, it could be down below the lows of March 6, 2009. Maybe in gold terms, we could one day reach a ratio of Dow Jones to gold of 1-to-1, as we were in 1980. In other words, the Dow could be perhaps at 10,000 or 12,000, and gold could be at the same level.

That is why I am advising people to accumulate gold. Can gold have a correction? Yes, there has been a little bit too much euphoria about gold, and we may have a correction, but I do not think we are in a bubble in the price of gold. In fact, I could make a case that gold, at this level of $1400 an ounce, is cheaper than in 1999, when I look at the unfunded liability growth of the U.S., at the credit growth of the U.S., and at the household growth, and at the money printing, and at all the wealth creation that happens in China and Russia.

As insane as it might sound, the United States may soon be getting involved in another war in the Middle East. According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, "no options" have been taken off the table when it comes to the situation in Libya. By saying that "all options" are being considered, that is basically a way for the Obama administration to threaten Gadhafi without actually coming right out and threatening him. In recent days, news reports have been appearing all over the mainstream media hyping the possibility that we may have to take military action in Libya. This would not be happening if the White House did not want it to happen. The truth is that Barack Obama is apparently seriously considering U.S. military action in Libya. At first that would probably consist of air strikes and missile attacks, but if the Obama administration decides that it is going to take ground forces to get the job done then we could eventually see the U.S. military actually invade Libya. But the truth is that any military intervention in Libya would be a really, really bad idea. Is it really wise to stick our young men and women into the middle of an incredibly bloody civil war? Do we want to spill even more American blood in order to protect "U.S. interests"? Do we really want to spend young American lives to keep the price of oil low? The truth is that the world hates us enough already. How much more will they hate us if we decide to start bombing Libya into oblivion?

All kinds of justifications are already being floated for potential military action in Libya. Barack Obama is publicly declaring that the killing of civilians in Libya has got to stop. As if the U.S. government cares so much about the deaths of civilians. Millions upon millions of Africans have been slaughtered in Africa over the last couple of decades in numerous civil wars and we have not intervened.

So why now?

Well, because oil is at stake.

If Libya did not produce about 2 percent of the world's oil nobody in the U.S. government would really care much about what is going on in Libya.

But because Libya is Africa's largest oil producer suddenly the death of their civilians becomes a matter of "international concern".

An audio talk about the creation of the Federal Reserve by the author G. Edward Griffin. This is an explanation of the basic ideas from the book given in very simple language that anyone can understand. Find out what the Federal Reserve is all about and what is the real reason for the economic collapse we are currently experiencing. After you do, you'll be chanting "End the Fed". This is from 1994 but you would think he gave this talk last night...

7/7 Inquest: Was someone afraid to reveal the causes of deaths?
It is quite startling to realise that a special room had been set up to receive the dead of the July 7th bombings in a temporary morgue built on army land, the contract for which (see [1] below) arrived on the contractor’s desk on July 6th, the day before the massacres.

All the bodies of the dead were taken and cryogenically stored here.

Not until the Inquest, five years later, did startled lawyers acting on behalf of the victim-families get to hear, that NO POST MORTEMS had been performed on the dead.

Let us repeat this astonishing statement, the better to realise our own astounded bafflement:

NO POST MORTEMS HAD BEEN PERFORMED ON THE DEAD.

Let’s listen to the bewildered comment from pathologist Dr. Awani Choudhary, one of the first doctors on the scene from the BMA at Tavistock Square, who testified to the Inquest about his attempts to save the life of Gladys Wundowa:

‘I have not seen the post-mortem report, but I thought that she was bleeding from somewhere … So if the post-mortem says that she was not bleeding from anywhere, just had a spinal injury, I will be surprised…
Q. Since you ask about the post-mortem, can I simply inform you that, as with all the other casualties of the day, no internal post-mortem was conducted into Gladys Wundowa, so unfortunately, much as we would like the answers to the questions that you’ve asked, they don’t –
A. I… I’m absolutely sure that she had had internal injury as well as a spinal injury, and I’m absolutely surprised that a post-mortem has not been done through and through.
Q. Well, Mr Choudhary, that isn’t a matter to concern you.
A. Sorry.
Q. … we don’t need to concern ourselves about that matter. (Jan 20 am, 63:22- 65:6)

No, of course not. 52 dead and no post-mortems, nothing to worry about.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY EXPLAIN THE ASTONISHING DECISION NOT TO CARRY OUT POST MORTEMS? THE GREATEST MODERN ACT OF MASS-MURDER ON BRITISH SOIL AND NO ONE WAS INTERESTED IN COLLECTING PRECISE EVIDENCE OF CAUSE OF DEATH.

SO MUCH COULD HAVE BEEN LEARNED ABOUT THE EXPLOSIONS AND THE EXPLOSIVES FROM SUCH MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS.

IS IT UNFAIR TO SUSPECT THAT THE FAILURE TO COLLECT THIS BASIC INFORMATION WAS CAUSED BY FEAR (OR WORSE) THAT POST MORTEMS WOULD THROW UP SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE TO CONTRADICT A PREORDAINED NARRATIVE OF SUICIDE-BOMBER TERRORIST ATTACKS? MIGHT THE INJURIES HAVE INDICATED THE USE OF MILITARY-GRADE EXPLOSIVES TO WHICH THE ‘TERRORISTS’ COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE HAD ACCESS?

Inflation, “Painless Taxation”
Inflation concepts are not taught in school, it is just something we are told to live with. Historically, it has ranged between 3 to 12 percent. Prices increase and employers raise pay rates to offset it. It lends to the perception that you are moving up with each “pay raise.” Notice as you “earn more” you tax rate increases accordingly. Congress doesn’t need to raise the bar, inflation did it for them.

What is inflation? In simple terms, it is the government printing money instead of taxing the people. But there is more to it, than that. In a normal economy we produce 100 widgets and get paid 100 dollars. You get a dollar for each widget. If the government needed 50 widgets, they would print 50 dollars, purchase them, and then consume them. Then there would be 50 widgets left for consumption and 150 dollars chasing the remaining widgets. The net effect is that widgets have jumped in price to three dollars apiece. This is what inflation is all about.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. When Spain brought tremendous amounts of silver back from the new world, inflation took off. This was “real money” but there wasn’t any product to match to it, prices increased dramatically. The same thing is happening here. We get paid money for making product. When dollars are printed, the product is still consumed, but now there are more dollars chasing fewer products. The government can print money, but they cannot print food, energy, and housing. Government consumption, by way of food stamps and unemployment insurance, makes goods scarcer for consumption and prices rise.

The government taxes about 20% of our earnings through income taxes. With inflation there is no government paperwork. Let’s say you were lucky and saved up a million dollars before retirement and it took you 20 years. In this case, inflation is an invisible tax, you haven’t lost any dollars, but your dollars have lost half of their purchasing power. The government’s printing of money has confiscated half of your bank savings. The reason this government game works so well, is that the average person has a complete disconnect, between the concept of the real purchasing power of the dollar, and the apparent value of their savings. Their dollars are all there, nothing is missing---shhh, no need to upset them.

The politicians want to tax the rich; I suggest they are already doing an outstanding job of it. The sky rocketing ascent of the national debt is proof enough. Inflation is rampant if you include food and energy. We will see a dramatic loss of our purchasing power over the coming years. You won’t lose one dollar, but a dozen eggs could cost 12 dollars. Naturally, there will be a Congressional investigation into the chicken farmers gouging the public.

The thing that ought to make everyone angry is that inflation is stealing from those that saved a lifetime. You save hard earned money only to have the government make it worth less over time. Inflation is not perceived by our youth, it takes time to experience the reality of it. But, to those about to retire, they have experienced its effects. The silver foxes can see what it has done to their retirement savings and their plans for the future. Mention any of this to a Congressman and he’ll look back over his/her shoulder to see who you are talking to,--it can’t be him.

What’s next, ten dollars for a cup of coffee? -- And a dollar for cream and sugar? Of course with Obamacare, maybe I can get my doctor to write me a prescription for Bacon and Eggs with Coffee and OJ ( I have a $10 co pay on prescriptions). That’s an inflation pill I can swallow.

Media Blackout: CNN Fox News and MSNBC Ignore 100,000 WI Protesters
Over 100,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin were joined by thousands of other Americans around the country in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from the state’s unionized workers, but you would not have known any of this if you watched cable news on Saturday as the coverage of the protests ranged from disappointing (MSNBC) to scant (CNN) to non-existent (Fox News).

AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale estimated that the crowd was over 100,000 people before the rally began at 3 PM. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, police estimated the crowd size at around 70,000 three hours before the rally began, “Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the number of protesters around the Capitol is on the scale of last Saturday’s peak crowd of an estimated 68,000 and could swell even more for a 3 p.m. rally.”

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country march on their governments in an event that would be a perfect fit for the 24 hour cable news cycle. Even better, the protests were occurring during the news cycle dead zone of Saturday afternoon. The coverage should have been everywhere in the media, but if you turned on your television in hopes of watching the rally from Wisconsin live, you were disappointed.

As the official state run television of the Republican Party, Fox News has been openly and loudly supporting Gov. Walker. It is no surprise that the right wing network would ignore the events in Madison and around the country today. A propaganda outlet never spends much time relaying information that is detrimental to their message.

The Flood Of Money Drowns Out The ValueBob ChapmanThe world is awash in dollars and that is being reflected in the USDX, which are six major currencies versus the dollar. The loss of value is being loudly trumpeted as the IMF says a replacement must be found. This is the same IMF that has been foisting non-gold backed SDRs on us since 1969. Every time they have tried this it has been a failure. We can give the Illuminists an ‘A’ for effort, but what they do not get is that the professionals and investors see right through it. Another batch of fiat currency is not going to solve the world’s currency crisis, which can only be saved by gold backing. Needless to say, the mainstream media will never talk about this in realistic terms, because the elitists control them. The denigration of currencies versus gold and silver are advancing apace, as the elitists day after day try to suppress gold and silver prices.

The major media is as complacent as ever because they are totally controlled. It is not ignorance or incompetence. It is control. The media tells us the stock market is headed higher, but fails to tell us why. The reason is manipulation by the US government, and those who control it, and funds swamping the market via QE2. This is an economy where few jobs are being created, unemployment remains steady and we are told that a rising stock market means recovery, which is far from the truth. Propaganda flourishes as well as physiological warfare. There is no truth for the American people and the people of the world, it is all controlled and capsulated for consumption and control. There is no real recovery; it is all smoke and mirrors to mislead the public. Government and the media declare there is no inflation, but yet it abounds. This is the same media that has ignored the climb in gold and silver prices for 11 years. They have few explanations as to why gold and silver prices are rising. It is because the value of fiat currencies are falling versus gold and silver, but that is not the explanation we hear. We are told a number of absurd falsities.

Gold and silver are just now beginning to break out of government instigated doldrums, which has been government induced by those who own the Fed. None of the old tricks and nostrums is working anymore, so new tactics are being taken. You have seen ongoing attacks on gold and silver that has been going on since 1988, and in the last 15 years they have been relentless. As of late the theme is destroy the gold and silver shares to make people believe that there is little value there, to shake novices out of their positions. The psywarfare plan is to force down gold and silver share prices and gold in order to destroy silver prices so that JPM and HSBC can cover their shorts. It hasn’t worked and won’t work. Needless to say, we get the usual from CNBC, CNN, MSNBC and Fox. Is it a bubble or a craze? Again, what else would you expect from a media which is usually wrong.

The debt and inflation will become more terse as we struggle forward. Government knows it has to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, screwing the participants and better enabling government to control and reduce these benefits. Allowing government to renege over and over again does not instill confidence in its citizens. There are mammoth cuts coming, but the military industrial complex will experience few. This is how the elitists keep their empire by threat of force. Just look around you and look at the Patriot Act and Homeland Security or the new Gestapo the FBI. Yes readers, you already live in a police state.

As Americans overlook these developments and the fact that anyone who criticizes government is a terrorist, price inflation is destroying their purchasing power and it’s being done deliberately, as a result of saving a broken banking system that only catered to the wealthy and connected. Loans are available, but generally only to AAA corporations and fellow elitists, as interest rates begin their devastating rise into the future. That needless to say will be accompanied by a falling dollar and higher gold and silver prices. Many other countries have duplicated these events, so not only will the US dollar fall in value, but also so will the currencies of most every other country versus one another and particularly versus gold and silver. In case you missed it, or forgot, versus nine major currencies over the past 10 years on average gold has appreciated 15-1/4% annually and silver 20-3/8% annually, thus, these facts are nothing new. They have just been hidden from you. As a result of the loss in purchasing power and ever building debt we have seen demonstrations and riots throughout Europe for the past two years. That has been followed for the same reasons, plus price inflation, in the Middle East with the overthrow of the governments of Tunisia and Egypt. Several more monarchies and dictatorships are on the verge of falling as well. In the US the attempt to radically change retirement benefits and unions has led to demonstrations in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. We believe in time as unemployment rises with prices and there is no economic recovery that demonstrations will increase and they could, as they have elsewhere, turn violent. If police in the US fire on civilians or beat them into submission there will be retaliation and law enforcement will get decimated.

There is absolutely no way the dollar and other currencies can be saved. That is why the prices of gold and silver move relentlessly upward. There already is waning confidence in the dollar and many other currencies, and that is why the USDX, the dollar index, as a yardstick, is inferior to measuring all currencies versus gold and silver. You may not realize it now, but you are living through the collapse of fiat money systems. The future of monetary and fiscal matters will take many twists and turns, some good, some bad. It is far too early to make solid predictions on what routes will be taken. At this juncture it is easy to see where we are headed, but the future is more difficult. It could be inflation, hyperinflation, deflationary depression and another contrived war to distract people from the more important issues of the economy, finance and economic survival. In the meantime in reaction to such events gold could go to $5,000 or $10,000 and silver $100 to $500, as the flight to quality becomes a stampede.

Our studies and intelligence tells us that the elitists running the show deliberately planned a collapse so they can form a world government. For them everything is on the line. If they lose they’ll lose everything. If we lose the same could be true. We are not going to lose, because to many people worldwide already know what they are up too and that what we are experiencing was planned that way. Why do you think QE1 financial sectors were saved in the US and Europe and in QE2 the US government was bailed out. It is very obvious to thinking people as to what is taking place. The edifice that underlies elitist power has been bolstered as the US and European economics are being allowed to fail. Tough decisions will have to be made to save the dollar and the economy and that is not going to happen because those running the show behind the scenes do not want that to happen. The route being presently taken is that of the Fed funding all Treasury and Agency needs including deficit spending. In such a scenario gold and silver prices have no limits to the upside. It could also be that the majority of your gold and silver holdings may never be sold due to the ongoing turmoil the world may be buried in...

Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion
If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

Join The MovementIn previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.

IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal aristocracy controls the global economy...

After watching this you will be very careful about what you have copied anywhere.
Commerical printer &/or in your office or even your home printer.
How many times have you copied important documents at work or ??

Saturday, February 26, 2011

Now, I have college educated co-workers who believe this organization doesn't even exist. This is a partial list to demonstrate that all these folks, from both the so-called left and right, and from both major political parties, all attend the same meetings to discuss ways to bring on the New World Order which is the agenda of the Trilateral Commission as set forth by its' founding member David Rockefeller. We see here a collection of former and present FBI directors, CIA directors, congressmen, senators, various cabinet members, news reporters, newspaper publishers, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and even the clown who guided the 9/11 Commission. These people are the architects of the destruction of the United States as we know it. They don't get together just to have coffee and play cards. For a complete list, click on the link at the end of the post...

Trilateral Commission Complete Membership List May 2010

North American Group

Graham Allison, Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; former Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government; former Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President William Clinton

Richard L. Armitage, President, Armitage International LLC, Washington, DC; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State

Zoë Baird, President, Markle Foundation, New York, NY

David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, Washington, DC

Harold Brown, Counselor and Trustee, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; former General Partner, Warburg Pincus & Company, New York, NY; former U.S. Secretary of Defense

John M. Deutch, Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; former Director of Central Intelligence; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense

Dianne Feinstein, Member (D-CA), U.S. Senate

*Thomas S. Foley,former U.S. Ambassador to Japan; former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; former North American Chairman, Trilateral Commission, Washington, DC

Richard A. Gephardt, Senior Counsel, DLA Piper, Washington, DC; former Member (D-MO), U.S. House of Representatives

*David R. Gergen, Harvard Kennedy School Professor of Public Service and Director of the Center for Public Leadership, Cambridge, MA; CNN Senior Political Analyst; U.S. News and World Report Editor-at-Large

Richard N. Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY; former Director, Policy Planning, U. S. Department of State; former Director of Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings Institution
*Carla A. Hills, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Hills & Company, International Consultants, Washington, DC; former U.S. Trade Representative; former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Reuben Jeffery III, Senior Adviser, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC; former Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs; and former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc., New York, NY; former U.S. Secretary of State; former U.S. Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs; Lifetime Trustee, Trilateral Commission

John D. Negroponte, Vice Chair, McLarty Associates, Washington, DC; former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State; former U.S. Director of National Intelligence; former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq

Thomas R. Pickering, Vice Chairman, Hills & Company, International Consultants, Washington, DC; former Senior Vice President, International Relations, The Boeing Company, Arlington, VA; former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs; former U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the United Nations

Richard Plepler, Co-president, HBO, New York, NY

John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer, Center for American Progress, Washington, DC; former Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton

Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), Vice Chairman, The Cohen Group, Washington, DC; former Commander, U.S. European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander NATO; former Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Department of Defense

William H. Webster, Senior Partner, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, Washington, DC; former U.S. Director of Central Intelligence; former Director, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation; former Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit

Philip Zelikow, White Burkett Miller Professor of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; former Counselor, U.S. Department of State; former Executive Director, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (“9/11 Commission”)

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report, and Publisher, New York Daily News; Founder and Chairman of Boston Properties, Inc.; New York, NY

Former Members in Public Service

Adm. Dennis B. Blair, U.S. Director of National Intelligence

Stephen Bosworth, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Policy*

Lael Brainard, Under Secretary for International Affairs, U.S. Department of the Treasury

Kurt Campbell, Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. State Department

Thomas E. Donilon, U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor

Diana Farrell, Deputy Director, National Economic Council, and Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, The White House

Michael B. G. Froman, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security and Economic Policy, The White House

Timothy F. Geithner, U.S. Secretary of The Treasury

Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan

Another example of how the phony war on climate change is costing us millions of tax dollars that can be better spent on the real problems we are facing. This photo does not imply Al Gore is making any money off of this particular deal but you get the point. Others are...

Sociological Study Funded by USDA
Source - Des Moines Register

The project’s goal is to find out how various cropping methods affect greenhouse gas emissions or aid farmers in adapting to climate change and to evaluate farmers’ willingness to adopt new cropping systems.

Lois Wright Morton, a rural sociologist associated with Iowa State’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, will lead a team of researchers from 10 universities in nine Midwest states and two U.S. Agriculture Department research stations in Ohio. The team will include agronomists, plant and soil scientists, greenhouse gas specialists, economists, ecologists, agricultural engineers and sociologists. Twenty of the researchers will be from Iowa State.

The project is one of three multistate research programs related to climate change that the USDA said Friday it would fund, each with a $20 million grant. The other projects will focus on forestry in the Southeast and wheat production in the Pacific Northwest.

Overcoming Divide and Conquer Strategies: 99.9% of the US Population Should Support the Public Unions’ Fight Against Occupying Economic Imperialists By David DeGraw
There is a rule of war that many people are failing to understand: “Do not fight the last war.” In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene calls this “The Guerrilla-War-Of-The-Mind Strategy:”

“What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats. You must consciously wage war against the past and force yourself to react to the present moment. Be ruthless on yourself; do not repeat the same tired methods.”

The sad truth is that most people are still fighting yesterday’s war. The Republican vs. Democrat charade — good cop, bad cop nonsense — is a mere smokescreen. Don’t be confused by obsolete preconceptions and propaganda. There is one war being fought, The Global Economic Elite Vs. The People.
A global banking cartel has looted nation after nation, the world over, the United States is no exception. They’ve looted trillions from the US public and now they are trying to cut the throat of the public unions. While in the process of attacking private-sector workers and small businesses throughout the country, they are also cracking down on the last layer of worker protections within the public-sector.
The same economic central planners that have systematically exploited workers in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Asia, have exploited American workers as well. One-tenth of one percent of the population got luxurious life boats, while 99.9% of us are being left behind to drown in a sea of debt and social upheaval.
Join The MovementWe are all on the same sinking ship – me, you, teachers, construction workers, fire fighters, police, Egyptians, Europeans. We are all under attack by the same people. The sooner you understand this, the better off we will be.
All of the global uprisings, against the global bankers, are popular reactions to the implementation of a worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order. People can dismiss and ignore me all they want, but I know what I’m talking about. In fact, I invite Ben Bernanke and Timothy Giethner to a debate. I’ll take them both on at the same time. I’ll expose the two imperial pawns within a minute, faster than Tyson knocked out Spinks.

The bottom line is this: It is imperative that 99.9% of the US population actively supports the public unions uprising against the occupying economic imperialists who have conquered our country. If the economic imperialists think they’re going to continue their attacks, by cutting more American workers’ wages and benefits, after looting the nation of trillions, they are going to get a much deserved rude awakening. If they want to steal trillions, increase the price of food and oil, and make further cuts into our income, they are going to get crushed. 239 million Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Push them another inch, and the global bankers might as well go hang with Gaddafi and Mubarak.
Seriously, think about this: They’re going to cut pensions on people who make $25k per year, while all-time record-breaking profits and bonuses are raining down on the economic top one-tenth of one percent. That is sick and twisted. Lloyd Blankfein gets five-times the annual salary of Wisconsin public employees when he simply gives a 30-minute speech on “doing God’s work.”
These banks were bailed out after causing this mess, the American people own them now as far as I’m concerned. Let’s stab the vampires in the heart. Seize their assets and all these budget problems disappear. Break these bloodsuckers up. Spin them off, free the market, free the people, free the planet from this global banking cabal...

Pulitzer Prize winning tax reporter, David Cay Johnston, has written a brilliant piece for tax.com exposing the truth about who really pays for the pension and benefits for public employees in Wisconsin.
Gov. Scott Walker says he wants state workers covered by collective bargaining agreements to “contribute more” to their pension and health insurance plans. Accepting Gov. Walker’ s assertions as fact, and failing to check, creates the impression that somehow the workers are getting something extra, a gift from taxpayers. They are not. Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin’ s pension and health insurance plans for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.

Via tax.com

How can this be possible?

Simple. The pension plan is the direct result of deferred compensation- money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of deferred compensation from reading about the latest multi-million dollar deal with some professional athlete. As a means of allowing their ball club to have enough money to operate, lowering their own tax obligations and for other benefits, ball players often defer payment of money they are to be paid to a later date. In the meantime, that money is invested for the ball player’s benefit and then paid over at the time and in the manner agreed to in the contract between the parties.

Does anyone believe that, in the case of the ball player, the deferred money belongs to the club owner rather than the ball player? Is the owner simply providing this money to the athlete as some sort of gift? Of course not. The money is salary to be paid to the ball player, deferred for receipt at a later date.

A review of the state’s collective bargaining agreements – many of which are available for review at the Wisconsin Office of State Employees web site - bears out that it is no different for state employees. The numbers are just lower.

Check out section 13 of the Wisconsin Association of State Prosecutors collective bargaining agreement – “For the duration of this Agreement, the Employer will contribute on behalf of the employee five percent (5%) of the employee’s earnings paid by the State. ”

Johnston goes on to point out that Governor Walker has gotten away with this false narrative because journalists have failed to look closely at how employee pension plans work and have simply accepted the Governor’s word for it. Because of this, those who wish the unions ill have been able to seize on that narrative to score points by running ads and spreading the word that state employees pay next to nothing for their pensions and that it is all a big taxpayer give-away.

If it is true that pension and benefit money is money that already belongs to state workers, you might ask why state employees would not just take the cash as direct compensation and do their own investing for their retirement through their own individual retirement plans.

Again, simple.

Mr. Johnston continues-

Expecting individuals to be experts at investing their retirement money in defined contribution plans — instead of pooling the money so professional investors can manage the money as is done in defined benefit plans — is not sound economics. The concept, at its most basic, is buying wholesale instead of retail. Wholesale is cheaper for the buyers. That is, it saves taxpayers money. The Wisconsin State Investment Board manages about $74.5 billion for an all-in cost of $224 million. That is a cost of about 30-cents per $100, which is good but not great. However it is far less than many defined contribution plans, where costs are often $1 or more per $100.”

If the Wisconsin governor and state legislature were to be honest, they would correctly frame this issue. They are not, in fact, asking state employees to make a larger contribution to their pension and benefits programs as that would not be possible- the employees are already paying 100% of the contributions.

So I am a blogger now.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Don't know if anyone will ever see it or care, but here it goes. I intend it be a humorous, music, sports and current issues flavored site with postings of links to my favorite videos, info about my favorite bands, stuff I find funny and things I find newsworthy. It might become political at times. I just can't help myself. I will also use this as a forum to put things out there for information and education sake. I like to expose people to alternative ways of viewing events both past and present. I never believe everything I read and don't claim to have all the answers despite what many of you who know me believe. Hence the title of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to pass on any comments.

Disclaimer:

Many of the articles I post here are taken from some of my favorite alternative news sites and blogs. I do my best to post the link to the the source of the original article as well as the author's name if it is provided. If someone notices any omission on my part or feels that they would prefer that I not post their articles here, please contact me. I try to post the work of others in bold and italics. My comments or any work that is original to me, is presented in regular type format. My intention is to pass on information I find interesting or important to others for informational and/or educational value. Again, if someone wishes that I not use their work, please contact me. I will gladly remove it and refrain from posting it in the future.